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Uncyclopedia, which aims to be " encyclopedia of politically incorrect non-information", is a parody of Misplaced Pages. Its entries are nonsensical, with little or no resemblance to the truth.
For example, the algorithm entry from Uncyclopedia claims that algorithm is a term for "Al Gore getting his groove on." The Al Gore entry states that it is currently unavailable, and suggests that Al Gore might need to re-invent the Internet. Another example is the entry on Adolf Hitler which claims that he was Oprah Winfrey's first attempt at taking over the world. Yet another example is that of Pot v. Kettle, a satirical view of the Supreme Court and a joke of the "Pot calling the Kettle black" adage.
Uncyclopedia was launched in January of 2005 as a satire piece on Misplaced Pages, originally as a response to the demand in Misplaced Pages's "bad jokes and other deleted nonsense" pages for a place to put their nonsense. However, it was not advertised at all on Misplaced Pages itself, and grew into a place for small satirical essays on assorted topics. The site uses MediaWiki sofware to mimic Misplaced Pages conventions, such as the stub disclaimer template:
| This article is a stub. The article submitter may also have been smoking crack. You can help Uncyclopedia by expanding it. |
which parodies Misplaced Pages's:
This article is a stub. You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it.According to the founder of Uncyclopedia, the unofficial mission of Uncyclopedia is to provide a SPOV, or Satirical Point of View, to life. In the wiki format, however, it frequently deviates from this goal, and produces somewhat humorous articles on all topics, most of which is not necessarily classifiable as satire. Humor of all categories enters the wiki, prompting an equally freeflowing response, such as the vandalistic classification of articles as "Childish Mysoginistic Humor" becoming an official category. In some senses, the site is a parody of itself, accepting inside jokes on its own being.
Despite the free nature of Uncyclopedia, which began as a collection of vandalism, the Uncyclopedia itself suffers from vandalistic attacks similar to those of other wikis. The creation of humor turns out to be not entirely material to random acts of text insertion. Indeed, the effort required to write one article on the Uncyclopedia of good quality arguably may be the same, or even exceed the effort required to produce a factual article on Misplaced Pages. Good humor may be more difficult than good information, as it can be said that there is a correct, or publically accepted form of a fact, and not necessarily a universal joke.
It is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 license.